Company A makes a shedload of cash so throws a huge celebrity party to celebrate how much money its customers gave it. Not only that, they broadcast video of its employees having fun accross the whole world. Why exactly is this so generous? Maybe Enron could release footage of their last stockholders party so we can look at streaming footage of the champagne being quaffed?
Dont get me wrong, I'm a fan of amazon, but if this was microsoft, people would be shouting them down.
democracy needs basic checks and balances. If 51% of a state is white and they pass a law saying black people should be burnt at the stake, thats representative democracy too, but it sure aint right. Hitler was voted in by popular support, and Stalin had a popular following too. So for that matter did george bush and castro. representative democracy is fine, as long as the people with the vote arent maniacs.
I'm not sure thats entirely fair. I'm an environmentalist, and occasionally an activist, although I have nothing against nanotech. Not all greens are etxremist lentil-chomping hippies, just like not all republicans are gun toting rednecks. Concern for the environment attracts a vast and diverse group of people. Attention is always given to the most extreme and stereotyped cross section. just as you don't often see a good looking charasmatic nerd on TV, you don't often see a level headed, pro-technology green either. I dont agree with this protest, and I don't agree with a lot of animal rights protests either, but I'm glad that a) society allows people to protest about stuff, even if I don't always agree and b) that there are people who keep an eye on what corporations are doing, whther it be animal welfare, greens or anti-capitalist groups. Extremist protestors of any description are a neccesary check and balance in a healthy free society. Remember when we all thought smoking had no health risks and asbestos was fine to build with? very occasionally the people we all think are wackos turn out to be right. cut them some slack.
absolutely true. I work for one of those big (and growing companies but fortunately I have my own little game company as an outlet for games I know won't get made. My new game is a politics game (think single-player nationstates), and despite it outselling my older mroe established tycoon game (which has a retail deal) by a factor of 6:1, the same publishers won't stock it because 'its too complex and intellectual for our audience'. Fair enough, direct sales to the customer mean more money for me anyway:) heres the game: http://www.democracygame.com/
Its good to see someone else slag off this idiot. Some people think because he has a beard and is a tv celeb he is somehow the definitive voice on the environment, even when miost of his ideas (like backing nuclear power as i recall) just show he is losing the plot bigtime.
I think thats just you. Chill out, have a raktajino and watch the springball.
Re:Why must a simple phone be so ugly?
on
Just a Phone?
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· Score: 1
like i say... its a phone. I dont care if people think my phone isnt trendy looking. Someone who won't hang out with me because my communications device isnt stylish isnt someone I want to know anyway. In that way, any perceived ugliness of it is a bonus social filter from my POV. Besides, ugly is a matter of opinion. Check out what clothes were the height of cool in the seventies...
Re:if you don't want the features just don't use '
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Just a Phone?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
you are missing the point. We are all capable of not using features, but incoporating them makes the phone more difficult to use, because the interface is more complex, the manual huge, and the speed of the phone is slower. Im sure my first cellphone didnt have a concept of a 'boot time', you just turned it on and dialed. These days its like waiting for Windows XP to load. I think this is a great idea, hopefully the start of a long overdue backlash against feature creep in all electronics. I have a combined DVD/Video player, and despite working as a programmer, I have no idea how to do simple tasks like set the timer. The remote control has about 100 buttons, including multiple different methods for fast forwarding (when DVDs allow it...grrrr). The thing that bugs me is the implication that a bare-bones phone is just for 'old people'. Believe it or not there are people of all ages who want a phone, but dont need it to have more features than a PC operating system. Some people just arent geek-obsessed about phones...
Re:Why must a simple phone be so ugly?
on
Just a Phone?
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· Score: 1
who cares, your not having sex with it, its just a phone;D
im a huge star wars fan, just got back home from watching EP3 at the cinema. To put it mildly, if you pirate this film you are a dork. This is a spectacular piece of film and it deserves to be seen at a big cinema with an audience. Dont be a tight ass, pay the money and go see this film. You have to be pretty sad to begrudge $10 or whatever for seeing a film this spectacular.
wow he must be consistantly lucky then, having been behind THX1138, american graffiti, star wars and raiders of the lost ark. Either than or he is talented. I know hich is most likely.
I agree. we are going through the same in the UK. People say "everyone has a bank card and a drievrs licence", but i don't HAVE to drive, and I can pay cash if I don't want Asda/walmart to know my spending habits. The really different thing about an ID card is the only way I can avoid the requiremnent to carry one, is to not be born in the UK, and guess what? I had no say in that. I was born here, I aint hurting anyone, and I have every right to freely go about my business without state interference. I sure hope the US doesnt go further down this route. People who oppose ID cards in the UK (sadly Blair is pro-ID and just got re-elected) often point to the US saying "Look! these guys had 9/11 and are paranoid as fuck, and even THEy dont have ID cards!" Dont let us down.
As someone whose worked at various big games companies, and writes his own stuff too, I really would rather someone at ATI attended a 'driver stability for dummies' course, rather than got all macho about 16 terrabyte RAM cards. if ATI cards were twice the speed of nvdia, I'd still avoid them, simply because nvdia drivers are rock solid and unfussy, whereas the ATI driver 'envrionment' is usually a bug ridden barrel of unstable bloatware, that avoids standards like the plague Your mileage may vary etc blah blah
I have to say in my own small one-man experience of the games market, that innovation IS rewarded, and clone games are not. Ive made a generic puzzle game, an asteroids clone, a tycoon game and This complex Politics Sim And the 'pretty original' politics sim outsells all the others combined by a factor of 7. That could be a co-incidence, but I certainly get the impression that gamers are crying out for new and different styles of gameplay, and reward makers of those games with good sales.
I was under the imrpession that GM is VERy different. A farmer cross breeding 2 crops is just doing what natural selection normally does, but in a managed way. Tomatoes dont naturally cross breed with jelly fish, which is one example of GM food. Until we 100% can account for what every single base-pair in the genome of every plant does, I'm against the random cut-and-paste experimentation that monsanto et al try to encourage. Its like grabbing a chunk of source files from one program and ramming them into another one, because your ecognise 3 or 4 bytes of assembly. You have no idea what side effects you are introducing. I for one dont want to see a blue screen of death in the food chain.
1)the waste problem, LONG term. 2)the security costs of defending these plants against osame and pals 3)the problem of leakage, and potential long term health effects on people nearby 4)the proliferation of nuclear tech. Pretty tough to lecture iran & korea about nuclear tech as you lay the foundations for 100 reactors.
Not flaming you, just after clarification of these points.
" environmentalism, as a political movement, is based on anti-corporatism" Bullshit. I run my own company and own shares in quite afew others, yet Im an environmentalist. Dont make assumptions about a political group you know so little about. Im also very pro hi-tech, as long as that tech is responsible, ethical and safe. You may live in a very very nice part of planet earth, with relatively little smog or air pollution, not much in the way of threat from climate change in the short term, no tsunamis, freak weather or rising sea levels. Bully for you. However, the rest of the world is not so lucky. There ARE people whose homes are dissapearing under risisng sea levels, there are people dying in freak weather, there are places where pollution is causing record levels of disease. The rich west is very good at exporting its crap to the third world and pretending there isnt a problem, while at the same time extracting all the finite resources from those very same countries.
Yeah doctor who was fairly crap, the acting bad, the scripts dire, the special effects a joke... But in terms of concepts it was actually pretty good. I remember the first time I read the story of genesis of the daleks, in some book, before there were repeats or DVDs of the episodes. Maybe I was young, maybe I was drunk, but its actually a pretty grim, depressing and scary story. The whole idea of the war on skaro being so endless, so destructive, and some maniac scientist deciding that instead of fighting the mutations, he just had to 'roll with it' and see what they would turn into... Its all pretty heavy stuff, carried on into dr who and the daleks, where they are convinced they will never ever be able to leave the dalek machines because they basically fucked up their own planet. The potential for the daleks to be scary is certainly still there, if you can suspend disbelief on the stairs thing. My fingers are crossed that this will be a really good episode, handeled well.
Well said. There is probably a good need for a website that lets people rate DVDs, purely on the content that is unskippable. If I got to amazon to buy a movie on DVD, it would be excellent to see a feature list that detailed how many unskippable ad clips and logos etc there were on the movie, and how long each one was. I could then make an informed decision not to purchase the advertising. If this was commonplace, companies would be able to do some split A/B testing and realise just how poorly this unskippable crap affects their sales.
Amen. Its pretty tragic when people rail against some harmeless kids just because they love star wars. Would these kids be 'cooler' if they were selling cocaine or heroin on the same street instead? People have a fucked up idea of who to slag off.
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Company A makes a shedload of cash so throws a huge celebrity party to celebrate how much money its customers gave it. Not only that, they broadcast video of its employees having fun accross the whole world. Why exactly is this so generous?
Maybe Enron could release footage of their last stockholders party so we can look at streaming footage of the champagne being quaffed?
Dont get me wrong, I'm a fan of amazon, but if this was microsoft, people would be shouting them down.
democracy needs basic checks and balances. If 51% of a state is white and they pass a law saying black people should be burnt at the stake, thats representative democracy too, but it sure aint right.
Hitler was voted in by popular support, and Stalin had a popular following too.
So for that matter did george bush and castro.
representative democracy is fine, as long as the people with the vote arent maniacs.
I'm not sure thats entirely fair. I'm an environmentalist, and occasionally an activist, although I have nothing against nanotech. Not all greens are etxremist lentil-chomping hippies, just like not all republicans are gun toting rednecks. Concern for the environment attracts a vast and diverse group of people. Attention is always given to the most extreme and stereotyped cross section. just as you don't often see a good looking charasmatic nerd on TV, you don't often see a level headed, pro-technology green either.
I dont agree with this protest, and I don't agree with a lot of animal rights protests either, but I'm glad that
a) society allows people to protest about stuff, even if I don't always agree and
b) that there are people who keep an eye on what corporations are doing, whther it be animal welfare, greens or anti-capitalist groups.
Extremist protestors of any description are a neccesary check and balance in a healthy free society. Remember when we all thought smoking had no health risks and asbestos was fine to build with? very occasionally the people we all think are wackos turn out to be right. cut them some slack.
absolutely true. I work for one of those big (and growing companies but fortunately I have my own little game company as an outlet for games I know won't get made. My new game is a politics game (think single-player nationstates), and despite it outselling my older mroe established tycoon game (which has a retail deal) by a factor of 6:1, the same publishers won't stock it because 'its too complex and intellectual for our audience'.
Fair enough, direct sales to the customer mean more money for me anyway:)
heres the game:
http://www.democracygame.com/
Its good to see someone else slag off this idiot. Some people think because he has a beard and is a tv celeb he is somehow the definitive voice on the environment, even when miost of his ideas (like backing nuclear power as i recall) just show he is losing the plot bigtime.
I think thats just you. Chill out, have a raktajino and watch the springball.
like i say... its a phone. I dont care if people think my phone isnt trendy looking. Someone who won't hang out with me because my communications device isnt stylish isnt someone I want to know anyway. In that way, any perceived ugliness of it is a bonus social filter from my POV.
Besides, ugly is a matter of opinion. Check out what clothes were the height of cool in the seventies...
you are missing the point. We are all capable of not using features, but incoporating them makes the phone more difficult to use, because the interface is more complex, the manual huge, and the speed of the phone is slower. Im sure my first cellphone didnt have a concept of a 'boot time', you just turned it on and dialed. These days its like waiting for Windows XP to load.
I think this is a great idea, hopefully the start of a long overdue backlash against feature creep in all electronics. I have a combined DVD/Video player, and despite working as a programmer, I have no idea how to do simple tasks like set the timer. The remote control has about 100 buttons, including multiple different methods for fast forwarding (when DVDs allow it...grrrr).
The thing that bugs me is the implication that a bare-bones phone is just for 'old people'. Believe it or not there are people of all ages who want a phone, but dont need it to have more features than a PC operating system. Some people just arent geek-obsessed about phones...
who cares, your not having sex with it, its just a phone ;D
shit now I feel like a total git. sorry dude.
and yet still you would rather watch it on a PC, with some jerky bits than pay a few dollars and see it on the cinema screen it was designed for?
your loss.
im a huge star wars fan, just got back home from watching EP3 at the cinema.
To put it mildly, if you pirate this film you are a dork. This is a spectacular piece of film and it deserves to be seen at a big cinema with an audience. Dont be a tight ass, pay the money and go see this film. You have to be pretty sad to begrudge $10 or whatever for seeing a film this spectacular.
wow he must be consistantly lucky then, having been behind THX1138, american graffiti, star wars and raiders of the lost ark.
Either than or he is talented. I know hich is most likely.
I agree. we are going through the same in the UK. People say "everyone has a bank card and a drievrs licence", but i don't HAVE to drive, and I can pay cash if I don't want Asda/walmart to know my spending habits.
The really different thing about an ID card is the only way I can avoid the requiremnent to carry one, is to not be born in the UK, and guess what? I had no say in that. I was born here, I aint hurting anyone, and I have every right to freely go about my business without state interference.
I sure hope the US doesnt go further down this route. People who oppose ID cards in the UK (sadly Blair is pro-ID and just got re-elected) often point to the US saying "Look! these guys had 9/11 and are paranoid as fuck, and even THEy dont have ID cards!"
Dont let us down.
and also a superb editor. Unlike many directors these days who churn out 3 hour movies because they cant tell a story in less time.
As someone whose worked at various big games companies, and writes his own stuff too, I really would rather someone at ATI attended a 'driver stability for dummies' course, rather than got all macho about 16 terrabyte RAM cards.
if ATI cards were twice the speed of nvdia, I'd still avoid them, simply because nvdia drivers are rock solid and unfussy, whereas the ATI driver 'envrionment' is usually a bug ridden barrel of unstable bloatware, that avoids standards like the plague
Your mileage may vary etc blah blah
and just like the poster said, there was a public outcry and an inquest lasting years. Thats exactly because this kind of thing is rare in the UK.
I have to say in my own small one-man experience of the games market, that innovation IS rewarded, and clone games are not.
Ive made a generic puzzle game, an asteroids clone, a tycoon game and This complex Politics Sim And the 'pretty original' politics sim outsells all the others combined by a factor of 7.
That could be a co-incidence, but I certainly get the impression that gamers are crying out for new and different styles of gameplay, and reward makers of those games with good sales.
I was under the imrpession that GM is VERy different. A farmer cross breeding 2 crops is just doing what natural selection normally does, but in a managed way. Tomatoes dont naturally cross breed with jelly fish, which is one example of GM food.
Until we 100% can account for what every single base-pair in the genome of every plant does, I'm against the random cut-and-paste experimentation that monsanto et al try to encourage. Its like grabbing a chunk of source files from one program and ramming them into another one, because your ecognise 3 or 4 bytes of assembly. You have no idea what side effects you are introducing.
I for one dont want to see a blue screen of death in the food chain.
I'm presuming you have a solution here to
1)the waste problem, LONG term.
2)the security costs of defending these plants against osame and pals
3)the problem of leakage, and potential long term health effects on people nearby
4)the proliferation of nuclear tech. Pretty tough to lecture iran & korea about nuclear tech as you lay the foundations for 100 reactors.
Not flaming you, just after clarification of these points.
" environmentalism, as a political movement, is based on anti-corporatism"
Bullshit. I run my own company and own shares in quite afew others, yet Im an environmentalist. Dont make assumptions about a political group you know so little about. Im also very pro hi-tech, as long as that tech is responsible, ethical and safe.
You may live in a very very nice part of planet earth, with relatively little smog or air pollution, not much in the way of threat from climate change in the short term, no tsunamis, freak weather or rising sea levels.
Bully for you.
However, the rest of the world is not so lucky. There ARE people whose homes are dissapearing under risisng sea levels, there are people dying in freak weather, there are places where pollution is causing record levels of disease.
The rich west is very good at exporting its crap to the third world and pretending there isnt a problem, while at the same time extracting all the finite resources from those very same countries.
Yeah doctor who was fairly crap, the acting bad, the scripts dire, the special effects a joke... But in terms of concepts it was actually pretty good.
I remember the first time I read the story of genesis of the daleks, in some book, before there were repeats or DVDs of the episodes. Maybe I was young, maybe I was drunk, but its actually a pretty grim, depressing and scary story. The whole idea of the war on skaro being so endless, so destructive, and some maniac scientist deciding that instead of fighting the mutations, he just had to 'roll with it' and see what they would turn into... Its all pretty heavy stuff, carried on into dr who and the daleks, where they are convinced they will never ever be able to leave the dalek machines because they basically fucked up their own planet. The potential for the daleks to be scary is certainly still there, if you can suspend disbelief on the stairs thing.
My fingers are crossed that this will be a really good episode, handeled well.
Well said. There is probably a good need for a website that lets people rate DVDs, purely on the content that is unskippable. If I got to amazon to buy a movie on DVD, it would be excellent to see a feature list that detailed how many unskippable ad clips and logos etc there were on the movie, and how long each one was.
I could then make an informed decision not to purchase the advertising. If this was commonplace, companies would be able to do some split A/B testing and realise just how poorly this unskippable crap affects their sales.
glad I don't live in your part of town then. Maybe they'd be even cooler if they owned handguns eh?
Amen. Its pretty tragic when people rail against some harmeless kids just because they love star wars. Would these kids be 'cooler' if they were selling cocaine or heroin on the same street instead?
People have a fucked up idea of who to slag off.